Many thanks, lovely. I've always loved Adorno's account of the rustling birth of the lyric as like the dimly apprehended sound of either wind or water moving unseen in a forest, who knows which it is... "rauschen", a quiet rushing.

Ray,

Very kind of you, and as to your still being about, I am pleased and gratefully relieved; in fact have just now visited your friendly rag & bone shop (where in fact you are looking very sharp), comparing notes with you about tube dread.

On first read "As traffic slowly hones the blade of morning" caught my imagination, but reading this over and over I love how the lines flow together and suggest: a place, and perhaps a place beyond place?

I don't know where that flowing place is... it's certainly there somewhere or we wouldn't be able to flail away so at the attempt to speak of it ("whereof we do not know...")... but the freeway-feeder traffic can be a knife in its heart, sometimes.

Hard to keep from thinking of Bartlett, in his later "paradise" years, as an entranced old surf bum (probably goofy-footed).

(Must confess that while doing up that latter post I had thought of you and sub-located the action, in my ancient daft mind, to Brighton Beach...)

I don't know what it is about poetry that enables it to unlock these gates in certain sensitive souls through which the mysterious, unexpected and sometimes even perhaps unwanted emotions come in such floods.

But I have long suspected you are one of those sensitive souls.

And without such souls I do not know that poetry would have any very good reason for existing; or even, for that matter, that it would come into being in the first place.